Cloudflare DNS and image cdn in front of Netlify

[fpguy]

Currently I have disabled accelerate and protect in Cloudflare due to the recommendation in this forum post:

[Support Guide] What problems could occur when using Cloudflare in front of Netlify?

Last reviewed by Netlify Support - June, 2024 Note: We recommend not using both Cloudflare’s CDN (“Accelerate and Protect”, the orange cloud in their UI) and Netlify for the same site at the same time. Why? Read on! Netlify’s web service is not designed to work optimally with another CDN “in front of” our CDN. Proxying to our service is in general not supported and we advise you not to do it for best hosting results. Cloudflare has made similar statements that it doesn’t recommend this usage…

I am using Cloudflare just for DNS right now, and Netlify’s image cdn by prepending “/.netlify/images?url=/” to all of my images. Netlify’s image CDN seems pretty slow, and I’d like to use Cloudflare instead. Am I going to receive the same penalties mentioned in the article above from the forums if I do this?

Is there a recommended way of doing this?

[hrishikesh]

I don’t think adding Cloudflare here would make any significant differences in speed to be honest. The only benefit Cloudflare might provide you is an additional cache layer, so for the situations where Cloudflare has the image cached, it would be a little faster. But outside of that, Cloudflare or not, you’d likely get the same performance.